Talent skill tree needs a rework - urgently

Started by DocsSmile, 2021 Mar 11, 18:35:38

previous topic - next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Go Down

DocsSmile

Hi.

All skills of a talent tree need to be unlockable with a decent price or requirement. The price of expert and master skills is insane and adding foal quests doesn't help if you're already a full grown pony.

If you are a veteran and come back after a very long time, you wonder why some skills you probably don't want are maxed out while some others you want to get by the love of Princess Celestia are locked expert skills and you know you had them purchased in the past.

So you wonder what in the world is going on. You want to do new foal quests as full grown pony, you want to reset your skill tree and get points back and most importantly, you want to get all available skills of the talents you have, all maxed out at level 45 - 50.

Back in my days, it was possible to have all skills and 1 skill per talent couldn't be maxed out due to a "few" missing TP. But now you need level 50 and at least 1000 TP extra to get every skill unlocked and maxed out. Having all skills unlocked is awesome because you already belong to a race and that race is already a restriction. As a unicorn, I do not care about the flying talent. But for my goodness, I want to have all the skills of my magic talent as the unicorn I am. And I want to have all of them maxed out.

A temporary solution for that until it's reworked, perfectly balanced and most optimized:

Simply reward the player with 250 TP every 10 levels on their talent, not just 20.

And for consideration when reworking features:

A lot of very questionable decisions have been made. The quality of a game is extremely important and I do not care about more content. The content we already have must be intelligent and friendly, equal to everypony.

It is extremely important to not rebalance players by soft-resetting their levels and such. A player possibly worked hard for something, may it be farming or science. And they would never ever see their level drop by 1, no matter how well explained that all is. Instead, a higher maximum has to be set to keep the player calm. Or don't make changes on that because the real problem lies elsewhere.

It doesn't take more than 7 days to take care of that mess but I'm not pushing. The game has insane potential, servers should be full all day, but where are all the players? Where is the success? If there is no success, something must have been made wrong. And acknowledging it is the first step to rescue a game.  ^-^  <3
Why would I post a game suggestion under discussion several months ago ...

The Great Sephiroth

The expert and master skills are for ponies who choose that talent as their special talent. They unlock for free. If you choose the cooking talent as a foal, you get all of those top-tier skills unlocked at no cost to you. Each talent has one or two (sometimes more) skills that cost normal amounts to unlock with the really good stuff set as expert or master for those who specialize in it. This is to prevent every pony from having every skill. You can buy expert skills in talents you did not specialize in, but it costs more because they are expert skills.

I do not know what games allow you to do it all, but as an avid Elder Scrolls fan since the first one (Arena) and major fan since the second one (Daggerfall) I can tell you these are the only games I can think of which allow you to max every skill, and it is VERY hard work. I was in the WoW alpha and beta, and I played for years. Each class had three skill trees and you NEVER had enough points to do it all. This means that no two shamans were alike, and it allowed you to make your character unique. WoW allowed you to reset your points and respec if needed, but it wasn't cheap. I would not mind the ability to respec here as well, with the exception of once you have chose your specialization, that cannot be changed.

It also goes along with the show and comics. Fluttershy and Dash are both pegasai in the show, but FS can't touch Dash in terms of flight. Her special ability is with animals, which Dash cannot do. This encourages you to have more than one pony and to work alongside other ponies. The game is fine and I believe most players enjoy it, but it is a work in progress and is subject to change. Maybe a team member can explain this better than I have. FWIW, I have many ponies in-game and I love them being unique.

DocsSmile

I would like to spend much more time investigating all the issues and reporting them, but several months ago I made the decision between LoE and a different game which is calm and basically a brain trainer. Perhaps LoE can also get new features that require more thinking of the player permanently by choice. How to make the player think even more? Perhaps by implementing a minigame. Fine, there are games on the internet that are optimized and it's hard to do it even better. But the sense of minigames in general is to offer even more variation and extend the game session of the player.

Anyway, I reread my post of the past and went into the game again because the update notes on the forum do not give me a clear view at all. The updates notes on the forum are clearly for those that know what's going on and absolutely not for comebackers that wanna see if the game has been improved greatly.

I picked the wrong time of the day, I knew it. But I was expecting at least 1 other player than me, ingame. Unfortunately, I was (seemingly) alone in both servers almost the entire game session. If the game was successful, at least 3 players would be in the game at any time of the day. Maybe I need a list of players that are online on the entire server (happy programming), not just the room I'm in, not just the list of friends.

Again, regarding minigames, something like a chess minigame for ponies could help. Maybe a snowball fight minigame in which flying and teleporting are disabled. Mario Party's minigames can also be taken as inspiration for an own minigame. That's just a quick idea. My thought on that is to make the player think they can do something else once they hanged out with others for the 100th time, mined for the 200th time and so on. How can I mention minigames while I'm confident? It's simply because I witnessed their success on a different game that could really need a bigger playerbase.

Now finally to review the main part of the topic.

I didn't lose my level, meaning no more soft-reset so far which is satisfying. But I'm not certain if I received extra TP. At least my mining talent is at level 50 and I still have 0 TP and can't get any more. Not even a single skill of the mining talent is maxed out. I'm not just close to max out all the skills. And I know I shouldn't be too close because my pony is not supposed to have too much unlocked on that. But I'm too far away! Quick judgement: No change or no noteworthy change has been made on that. Just please be a bit more generous towards the player and let them unlock more. Simply give them more TP. Don't keep so many things locked for the eternity regarding the talent tree. Please consider my 1st post if you didn't yet.

If I want to summarize everything, this has become a game project with a size that could have overwhelmed the entire dev team and they're probably aware of that.

Reasoning: We all know the size of LoE is much greater than the dev team. It becomes too hard to handle everything with the best care and at a good pace. The motivation to add new things from the dev team might be so much greater than making intelligent changes and taking much more care of bugs. I know, taking care of even more issues is not very satisfying as a developer. What I want to say is that the priorities are probably worth a deep consideration. I still say we have the quantity here. What really really matters right now is that quality of the game with the aim to keep the player in the game.

I might come back in the future and review everything once again if I'm allowed to. Sorry that I don't make separate topics or write any answers. You can also decide to ignore everything I've said and I may be fine. So what did trigger me to write this post and how can I actually be satisfied? Well, my interests and wishes are written here in order to come back some time soon. But what matters even more to me: The ponies, the community. I would like to see it grow like a tree.

I hope that everypony has enjoyed Christmas.
Why would I post a game suggestion under discussion several months ago ...

Go Up